Are Humans Ready? Where Imagination + Thoughts = Reality? by Jeffrey Thayer (August 2024)

 

“Are Humans Ready?  Where Imagination + Thoughts = Reality?  by Jeffrey Thayer (August 2024)

Reader input requested.  Most readers will remember the theme and storyline of the 1998 movie “Sphere”, adapted from a novel of the same name by its author, Michael Crichton.  Do not worry if you have not seen the film.  You can watch a short embedded video review with clips from the film in our short article review below.

That book and film are both topical to our ongoing discussion and articles concerning the Simulation Hypothesis, as well as the theme of Change the Thoughts.

The question in this short post is:  after reading short excerpts (below) from the book, do readers believe that human beings are ready for the power each of the characters receive in the film; that being, where their imagination + their thoughts = the reality they perceive?  

Would your answer change if you knew the average human thinks negative thoughts 80% of the time, and 95% of those thoughts are repetitive?  “Negative Thinking: A Dangerous Addiction, Why we can't stop thinking about the things that make us feel the worst.”  Psychology Today. (2019)

https://youtu.be/62pa4a8fCuk?feature=shared

Let me know your thoughts.🌀

EXCERPT 1:

…After a passage of time, he thinks, I am sorry, but I wish you would just explain and stop speaking in riddles.

On your planet you have an animal called a bear. It is a large animal, sometimes larger than you, and it is clever and has ingenuity, and it has a brain as large as yours. 

But the bear differs from you in one important way. It cannot perform the activity you call imagining. It cannot make mental images of how reality might be. It cannot envision what you call the past and what you call the future. 

This special ability of imagination is what has made your—species as great as it is. Nothing else. It is not your ape—nature, not your tool-using nature, not language or your violence or your caring for young or your social groupings. It is none of these things, which are all found in other animals. 

Your greatness lies in imagination.  The ability to imagine is the largest part of what you call intelligence. 

You think the ability to imagine is merely a useful step on the way to solving a problem or making something happen. 

But imagining it is what makes it happen.  This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. 

You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you—the ability to imagine.

I hope you enjoyed this speech, which I plan to give at the next meeting of the American Association of Psychologists and Social Workers, which is meeting in Houston in March. I feel it will be quite well received.

What? he thinks, startled.

Who did you think you were talking to? God?

Who is this? he thinks.

You, of course.  But you are somebody different from me, separate. You are not me, he thinks. 

Yes I am. You imagined me.

Tell me more.

There is no more. …

EXCERPT 2:

"I agree," Beth said. 

"I'm not sure the world is ready for that sphere. I certainly wasn't."

She gave Norman a sheepish look. He put his hand on her shoulder.

"That's fine," Harry said. "But look at it from the standpoint of the Navy. The Navy has mounted a large and expensive operation; six people have died, and two habitats have been destroyed. They're going to want answers—and they're going to keep asking until they get them."

"We can refuse to talk," Beth said.

"That won't make any difference," Harry said. "Remember, the Navy has all the tapes."

"That's right, the tapes," Norman said. He had forgotten about the videotapes they had brought up in the submarine. Dozens of tapes, documenting everything that had happened in the habitat during their time underwater. Documenting the squid, the deaths, the sphere. Documenting everything.

"We should have destroyed those tapes," Beth said.

"Perhaps we should have," Harry said.

"But it's too late now. We can't prevent the Navy from getting the answers they want."

Norman sighed. Harry was right. At this point there was no way to conceal what had happened, or to prevent the Navy from finding out about the sphere, and the power it conveyed. That power would represent a kind of ultimate weapon: the ability to overcome your enemies simply by imagining it had happened. 

It was frightening in its implications, and there was nothing they could do about it. Unless—

"I think we can prevent them from knowing," Norman said. "How?" Harry said.

"We still have the power, don't we?"

"I guess so."

"And that power," Norman said, "consists of the ability to make anything happen, simply by thinking it." …